Peel

Layers of wallpaper become an archive of family, time and the versions of ourselves we leave behind.

Peel grew from the many house moves of my childhood. Each move was another beginning, but also another home and another version of us left behind.

The layers of wallpaper became a way of thinking about those successive lives: the shedding of skins - different rooms, changing versions of a family and stories pressed one over another.

Wallpaper is used to decorate as well as to conceal. When it is stripped back, earlier patterns return in traces. The work absorbs the stories a family tells about itself and the parts of childhood it covers over. What lies beneath musty layers may be altered by memory or hidden from view, but it remains part of the surface.

“Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves.”

Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space.

Selected for *Conceal / Reveal*, Atkinson Gallery, Millfield School, 2026.